Wednesday, June 02, 2004

Moral equivalency or correct history?

Anne Applebaum is the author of Gulag -- an in-depth study of the Soviet concentration-camp apparatus for political prisoners. Today, her weekly Wednesday column in the Washington Post recounts the Warsaw Uprising, which began on August 1, 1944 and lasted for 9 weeks -- 50% longer than the French army lasted at the outset of World War II. At the end of her column, Applebaum drops this little bomb:

In fact, for millions of people, World War II had no happy ending. It had no ending at all. The liberation of one half of the European continent coincided with a new occupation for the other half. The camps of Stalin, our ally, expanded just as the camps of Hitler, our enemy, were destroyed. Not that you would know it, listening to Americans reminisce about D-Day, or the children welcoming GIs in the streets, or the joyous return home. Perhaps there is no such thing as an entirely "good war" after all.

Her dollop of moral equivalency is notable for its conventionalism. There is a large swath of historical theory that posits that the USSR and Stalin were as bad as or worse than Hitler and Nazi Germany. This concept is a dangerous fallacy on a number of levels, and deserving of more treatment than I can give on a weblog. Nonetheless, fighting WWII was an entirely "good war" -- it's the ultimate peace that had negatives.

The immediate criticisms: (1) Nazism was a government-imposed KKK -- a white supremacy conceit combined with centrally planned socialism that was popularly supported by (and indoctrinated into) the German people and not merely a construct put in place by a cadre of revolutionaries to impose a new rule upon an already subservient populace like the USSR (Read Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners re: the Nazi appeal to the Germanic volk and Richard Pipes' The Russian Revolution [the author's own condensed version will do] regarding the Bolshevik coup that created the USSR). The difference is tremendous -- systematic brainwashing of an entire people into acolytes of a supremacy movement based on an artificial concept of superior men and women versus the subjugation of vast populations for the communist elites. Which is worse? The one that works as a cult because the willingness of the people to join it infuses it with a legitimacy that is lacking vis-a-vis the leaders of the coup.
(2) Nazism endorsed the systematic destruction of millions of people because of its underlying theory of Aryan superiority; Communism did not contain such a concept, although it did justify deaths inflicted in the establishment of a communist state as a cost of revolution. The difference: again, an eagerness to cause destruction versus a willingness to endure it.
(3) Nazism's death camps and mass slaughter was a systemic government-run program; the Ukraine famine and numerous deaths attributed to Stalin were the work of a government apparatus controlled absolutely by a megalomaniac -- in other words, Hitler used his best acolytes (Eichmann, Himmler, Heydrich, Goebbels, Mengele, Goering) in a manner similar to a mafia boss and his capos; Stalin killed those closest to him.

In addition, Applebaum's column is too harsh (by far) on Churchill and too easy on both Roosevelt and Truman (and Truman is my second-favorite 20th century president). First, Churchill deferred to Roosevelt in Yalta and in many other respects after the US entered the War because the US had superior numbers and resources, the UK was spread so thin, and the power the UK would have AFTER the War would be so small relative to the US and USSR. But Roosevelt offered more to Stalin at Yalta than Stalin himself expected and FDR's ill-health made him a poor negotiator. Second, FDR and the US did not comprehend the USSR's territorial and ideological avarice; Britain had a better understanding but FDR continued to treat Stalin as the avuncular "Uncle Joe" portrayed in the US press. Third, Truman did not show resolve against USSR-inspired coups in Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland after the War -- he only announced the Truman Doctrine in 1948 (which saved Greece and Turkey), after Eastern Europe had fallen under Soviet domination.

Nonetheless, Applebaum's article is a worthy read to understand the heroism of the Warsaw combatants, what they sacrificed and why they should be honored.

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